Reading · The Fictional Aether

This story involves the entity known as a “postdoc”. Let me explain what that is.

In academia the various classes of low-life (non-professors) are all described in relation to something else. People without a degree are called undergraduates, because they have not yet graduated, although, however lazy and stupid and useless they may be, they almost certainly will. From that point on, success is less clear, and the labels are tethered to past milestones and strictly avoid the future. For example, those who have graduated and are now working on their doctorate, are called post-graduates. People who have a doctorate, but refuse to go away, are called postdocs. Once again, there is no reference in the title to where they are heading, because no-one knows. They think they are heading to academic positions; we find it wise to leave them to their illusions.

No-one outside academia has heard of postdocs, and rightly so. Society averts its gaze from its most unfortunate members — the sick, the aged, the poor. No-one wants to contemplate such people. They certainly don’t want to contemplate the postdoc.

We professors are not afforded such luxury. It is our burden to face the postdoc.

Allow me to illustrate.

A few days ago I had a great research idea, in the usual way: some clown published a stupid result, and then of course hordes of other clowns hailed it as a breakthrough and published a stream of ludicrous follow-up results. I had no choice but to write a damning rebuttal that trolled every one of them. But first I had to do the calculation to prove them wrong. However, as a renowned senior professor I hadn’t done a real calculation myself in over a decade, and certainly wasn’t going to risk the embarrassment of trying now.

This was one of those research problems that was best tackled at the pub. Over several pints my colleagues assisted me in mewling about how tragic it was that I didn’t have a postdoc to work on such urgent scientific questions, and how petty and stingy was the funding system in failing to correct the situation. We completed so many laps of the topic that it was almost a marathon, and I was so impressed and exhilarated with our stamina in having run so many times through exactly the same ideas in exactly the same words, that I felt like a miracle solution was about to present itself.

And then, just as I was starting on a fresh pint, it did.

Dr. Blowhard, fully tanked, leaned towards me and muttered. “This is all a lot of fun, but you do realise that you do actually have a postdoc?”

I turned towards him as quickly as I could in my heightened state. I discovered that he was in fact slumped against my shoulder. “What?”

His leery beery mouth was right next to my ear. I had to hold my breath while he spoke. “You’ve ignored him for so long that he’s started working for Dr. Rancid.”

“WHAT!?” This time I roared, and flung Blowhard into the arms of another sozzled academic.

Ah — I remembered now! “Shit! I forgot about Tom!”

I hired Tom almost a year ago, but when he arrived he did that usual annoying postdoc thing, and told me he couldn’t start any new projects because he needed to finish a paper first.

“It will only take a few weeks,” he said.

Oh, the innocence of youth! I was very good, and didn’t laugh at him, and generously told him I’d leave him in peace for a whole month.

Can you blame me if I forgot he existed?

Blowhard extricated himself from his colleague, and said, rather petulantly, “His name isn’t even Tom. It’s Jim.”

This guy was really getting on my nerves. Who cares what the idiot thought his name was? “Tom is the perfect name for a postdoc!” I yelled. “He should have been thankful I bestowed it on him. In fact,” and now I was getting very loud, and, full disclosure, slapping the table with each of the following details, “if I tell my postdoc that he’s named Tom, and he should wear the same uniform to work each day, and he should shine my shoes, and he should call me Dear Leader, then that is what he should do!” Plus one final table slap — and not a drop of my drink spilled!

My colleagues exchanged glances, and Blowhard said, “Ok, I think I need to be getting home.” They all nodded and stood up, pretty much simultaneously, and left me to marinade in my beer and bitterness.

Harrumph! My spirit was not so easily crushed! I took out my phone and began to compose a robust email to my wayward postdoc. It began quietly, “Tom — that is what I will call you, and that is what you will answer to,” and then really took off. Or would have, except I was interrupted by the arrival of an email from Tom himself.

Aha! This must be an apology. It was not a moment too soon.

I opened the email and this was the complete text: “I am applying for this permanent job, [link]. I need you to write me a reference letter. I have attached my CV.” It was signed, offensively, “Jim.” There was also a postscript. “PS: The paper is going well.”

Ok, this time when I hit the table, I did indeed spill some beer.

Do you see what I have to deal with? This is only the tip of the iceberg. Below the surface lies the full horror that has sunk many a professorial ocean liner.

Let’s start with the obvious facts: this dumbass had not made contact with me, his employer, for over nine months, and now he asked for a reference letter. No, correction, he did not ask. He simply informed me of what he required. He did not even wear down his sensitive tapping fingers by adding the famous magic word, “please”! And besides the audacity of asking me to support his job application, there was the audacity of the application itself — just how did he expect anyone to give him a job if he hadn’t even finished one stinking paper?

Perhaps the CV would enlighten us?

You could say that it did.

If you are anything like me, and on this one small point I suspect that you are, then you think of a CV as a well-organised list: a list of the places where a person was educated and trained, and a list of their qualifications, and of their various employments, and of their achievements. It is one or two pages long, no more, and that is the beauty of it. If you’ve done it right, you will read back your own CV, whoever you are, and say, “Huh. I guess I haven’t wasted my entire life.”

Not Tom. Tom went in for a modern variant called a “narrative CV”. It was divided into sections with headings that started with the almost comprehensible, “Contributions to knowledge”, and devolved rapidly into headache-forming and vomit-inducing abstractions and platitudes, until the very last, “Towards a synergistic transformation of scientific culture”. Under each heading was a dense block of meandering text. The whole thing was a screed of the kind of vacuous verbosity and pointless pontification that traditionally belongs in a statement of teaching philosophy.

I took a firm hold of my emotional support beverage and waded in. By the time I crawled out the other end, the beer was gone and the sympathetic bartender had moved me on to measures of his best Macallan.

So: what had my ambitious young postdoc been up to in the last year? Well, fuck-a-doodle-doo! He had joined several scientific collaborations, varying in size between 25 and 2500 members. Within those collaborations he had joined several “working groups”, with titles like, “Strategic White Paper Working Group” and “Scientific Milestone Interconnectivity Matrix Working Group”. Those were only the ones that pretended to be about science. He was also a member of, among other things, several permutations of a “Standards and Bylaws Committee”, and at least one “Ethical Guidelines for Publications Panel”. He was secretary to a sub-group charged with debating the procedures to determine the rules for the order of precedence in procedural debates. Inevitably, he was also part of a study team devoted to drafting prepared collaboration statements on a variety of global political conflicts. I admit that I was quite impressed by the last one, since that study team, in order to achieve an ideal level of diversity across ethnicity, gender, religious affiliation, geographical location, career stage, educational background, socioeconomic status, dietary requirements, height, weight, and preferred programming language, comprised 163 members — and Tom was the chair! For a moment I felt a surge of pride.

But just for a moment.

Then, even with the fortification of the whisky, I began to weep.

Poor Tom. There were two possible outcomes. The most likely was that during the job short-listing meeting each member of the selection panel would hold up this CV and deliver a long speech effusively praising Tom’s virtue, then bin it. The second would be that the majority membership of the selection panel were university administrators eager to hire quote-unquote “academics” who, after the requisite few years of departmental floundering, could be quietly promoted to their ranks. It’s hard to believe, but there is a fate even worse than being relegated to a career in industry.

I stared at Tom’s CV. This was hardly an uncommon moment in the career of a successful professor. I knew what I had to do. I had to rally myself, steel my will, marshal my thoughts, and write the recommendation letter that Tom deserved. Meaning: extol him as one of the great scientists of his generation and by far the most talented, creative, and productive postdoc I had ever worked with, to get the stupid bastard off my hands.

You disapprove? As I say, a common moment in an academic’s career, and the correct path was obvious. But there was also another path — the incorrect path.

Maybe it was the beer and the whiskies, maybe it was the loneliness of my little table in the corner of the pub, but most likely it was a manifestation of my beautiful soul. Whatever it was, I decided: I could help Tom! I could train him to be an actual scientist. I could show him how to shed the dead weight of these bullshit jobs, and how to out-maneuver and double-cross and ultimately thwart his weak-willed competitors, and fight his way to the top of the academic heap. I could take this spineless lump of uselessness and turn him into a champion!

After all, someone had to do that calculation for me.

That was the fateful, stupid decision I made in the pub that night.

I was so exhausted after this unexpected triumph over my better judgement that I asked the bartender if I could sleep at my table.

He said, “No, but we have hotel rooms upstairs.”

“Are they expensive?”

“They cost less than all the Scotch you ordered.”

“Perfect! Help me up.”

And so it began.

Beware of Pity for Postdocs

Comments